There’s a Captain Marvel? Admittedly, I know nothing about the comics, and haven’t even seen all the movies, so I guess that’s not a huge surprise. I also think the deaths didn’t feel meaningful because of how it’s clearly part of Dr. Strange’s plan, and you know they’re not going to do stuff like ...

I just saw this. It’s interesting. I’m pretty sure that Thanos’ glove was destroyed by doing that. It looks entirely broken, at least. IDK what the heck the pager was supposed to be, or the symbol on it. The thing is, I haven’t seen Age of Ultron — so some stuff kind of confused me. It was pretty de...

Yeah, it’s harmful to humans. 1000 mg of chocolate per 1kg of weight. Surely that’s just the level theobromine is toxic at, and not chocolate. I’ve definately eaten more dark chocolate than that number in one sitting before. I certainly didn’t get sick from it. The average American weights 79kg (fo...

This actually exists both on Nebraska's borders with Iowa and Missouri. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McKissick_Island https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carter_Lake,_Iowa I’m not actually all that surprised — this seems to be an issue everywhere there are borders and rivers. I know Texas/New Mexico had...

I’m embarrassed — I thought that Missouri didn’t border Nebraska anywhere (even though I’m going to school in IA and have spent a fair amount of time in Kansas City). I thought it only bordered Kansas on that side... Looking at a map, I guess I’m wrong. I’ve even crossed both the KS/MO border and th...

I've wondered, too, about the dummy pronoun thing. Pronoun-dropping languages like Spanish can avoid the issue by not specifying what is raining at all. And yet Japanese, which could employ the same trick, goes with the more prosaically accurate "rain is falling". As a schoolchild I alway...

This is amazing. My brother: - Has an applied mathematics degree - Is getting his Masters in Linguistics - Spent 1 year in between doing software development My brother could be all three people at once! Geez, I hope he never takes a job as a meteorologist. :) I hope he does :) Those would be some ...

The captcha still is broken for new registration, it seems. Google’s official solution is updating to version 2. I don’t know if it’s possible to pass the captcha in this state (considering there have been accounts registered since then, it seems like it’s possible), but for security, it is probably...

On an unrelated note, what happens if you integrate the original equation? If you integrate between two points on a curve, you get the area beneath the curve between those two points. That’s a definite integral. An indefinite integral gives you an equation whose derivative is the original curve (ak...

It depends on the specific setup and specific day. It’s a mixture of the forecast confidence and the forecast coverage, iirc. I tend to just read the forecast discussions instead — sure, they’re a bit technical, but the usually give a good overview of the forecast for the area and their reasoning be...

https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/meteorologist.png Alt text: Hi, I'm your new meteorologist and a former software developer. Hey, when we say 12pm, does that mean the hour from 12pm to 1pm, or the hour centered on 12pm? Or is it a snapshot at 12:00 exactly? Because our 24-hour forecast has midnight at ...

Also, nowhere in the constitution does it say that children of illegal immigrants are citizens... Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment is pretty explicit about this, and is, in actuality, quite easily Googlable. "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdi...

The 100 item challenge seems interesting. I mean, I’m always suprisingly comfortable when I’m backpacking and hauling around all my stuff. The hardest part for me to do that would be books. I’ve got tons of them — I’ve always been an avid reader, so most gifts I’ve gotten were books. I’ve bought boo...

I’d second learning a functional language in addition to OOP. It’s a pretty different paradigm that knowing, in my opinion, will help you as a programmer in general. Because you need to think about the problem from a different approach, it can be really helpful. Learning how to use git — even on a b...

Would you go on an expedition with this guy? So he survives, but he also seems to suffer more than his fair share of danger… I totally would. Outdoorsy stuff always comes with a risk — there’s no avoiding that. If you spend enough time doing the kind of stuff he does, you’re gonna run into some pro...

And "tableaux" is pronounced exactly the same as "tableau." It's just the plural form, and the final x is silent. Huh. I've always pronounced "tableaux" with a /z/ on the end... Okay, I just looked up "tableaux" in a couple of dictionaries, and neither Merria...

We're working on reading and translations right now in Russian, and I've gained a lot more appreciation for how hard translation is. Just now, we had to translate a short Turgenev poem -- that's from the collection "Dream Tales and Poems in Prose". Just getting a somewhat decent translatio...

I'm not sure I even know what a "xylem" is. I wonder why they didn't pick a less obscure word for their list, such as "xylophone" or "tableaux". Also, I pronounce "luxurious" with /gzh/ and not /ksh/. "Crucifixion" would have been a more unambiguous...

I don’t really care metric vs. US customary. The one thing I might have a slight preference for is Fahrenheit over Celsius — but only for the weather. It’s nice that 100° is close to the body temperature — it’s pretty clear that 100 will be hot because of that. 0° also makes sense as a threshold — t...

Dwarf Fortress is one of those games that I keep meaning to get back to some day - particularly if they ever add a decent interface (the interface is functional, but it is a lot like watching the Matrix without an interpreter program - and that carries through to player actions, not just discoverin...

SuicideJunkie is right — in Dwarf Fortress, you build the story. The basics of the game aren’t all that hard, so the fun really lies in shaping the history of the world. While your fort is running, your actions effect what goes on in the outside world. Now that sending out squads has been added, you...

history story — quoted so you get the notification That was great. Admittedly, I payed way less attention in American history than I should’ve (it certainly didn’t help that my teacher used this awful, completely flat monotone voice when he talked and that he basically gave us a sheet with exactly ...

“Catch”/“fetch” have the same vowel for me, with “match” being distinct. Ketchup is pronounced like “catch-up”. With respect to “crappie”, I use the pronunciation with the same vowel as “crop” (I’m not sure of the transcription). That’s also how everybody I’ve ever talked to about it says it. Then a...

Speaking of teacher walkouts, at least one Colorado district is closing so teachers can walk out. I’m surprised that the teacher walkouts aren’t in the news more — I mean, over the past couple days, there’s been literally nothing about it on my AP app. I didn’t even know there was a walkout in Kentu...

I'm not used to hearing either of those presidents (Hayes or Arthur) referred to without their middle initials (B and A respectively). It sounds weird without them. Me neither. Plus, just saying “Hayes” or “Arthur” doesn’t make me think “president”. I need the full “Chester A. Arthur” or “Rutherfor...

Regarding using libraries vs. rewriting — it’s probably better to use a well used, tested library for production code that is important. However, it can be really, really informative to implement it yourself. For instance, when I started learning about neural nets, I could’ve just used Keras or anot...

Development seems to have a big impact on floods — see Houston as an example. IDK whether or not I should be glad that I live somewhere where basically every flood is a flash flood. Sure, it means that the little creek in my neighborhood (almost always dry, like most creeks around here) can go from ...

There's an episode of Star Trek: Enterprise that explained why klingons didn't have ridges in TOS and why they did in TNG and later (and did in the prequel enterprise as well). Synopsis is they created a virus to genetically modify their appearance to better infiltrate humanity and it became an inf...

In the United States, the average yearly apple consumption is about 17 pounds (7.7 kg) of fresh apples per capita. That’s way more than I thought it would be. That’s like 2 a month... I guess I might be biased because I don’t like apples very much and I don’t live in an apple growing region, but it...

That article was a really good read. Theoretically sure, stopping people at the border makes sense. But the border isn't some magical line that we are going to line people up against. What will happen is the first 20, 50, or 100 miles north of the border is now being policed by the military. So you ...

I mean this is a horrible waste of resources and time, but I find it funny the the national guard can't be used to prevent people from illegally crossing your borders. I mean isn't that inherently what a military is for? The place where the question comes from is is catching people who’ve come acro...

Apparently, National Guard troops will be sent to the border to help curb border crossings. It certainly seems to be stretching the truth when the Secretary of Homeland Security is saying “the threat is real”. Sure, there’s drugs crossing the border, but doesn’t homeland security deal with stuff lik...

TIL that the automated system that calls me with flood warnings does actually call me with flood warnings. "Immediate action required," it said. I'm going to go and take a look. Did you get an actual call, or was it a message on a smartphone? I think we have both, but I’m only familiar wi...

Awesome! Another interactive one! I haven’t even scratched the surface, but you get a link to a YouTube video if you cast enhance ability as a Druid... I haven’t tried most of the spells. LOTS of links go to youtube videos. More than a few link to some channel that creates deliberately ugly charact...